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Riot Games are cutting more jobs at their studios, the company announced today. This is the second time in a year the League of Legends developer has laid off workers. Chairman and co-founder of Riot, Marc Merrill, made the announcement yesterday, claiming that by cutting these jobs the company was “evolving League” and “investing heavily in solving today’s challenges”. A total of 32 people have lost their jobs, mostly workers on League of Legends, according to a figure the developer gave to our sister site Eurogamer.
“This isn’t about reducing headcount to save money,” said Merrill in a post on Xitter, “it’s about making sure we have the right expertise so that League continues to be great for another 15 years and beyond.”
In January Riot announced they were slashing 530 jobs, a total of 11% of their global workforce. Today’s figure is significantly lower than those previous cuts, but that won’t make things easier for those who’ve lost work. As is normally the case with layoffs, the workers will get severance pay, but Merrill also says they will also get six months health coverage as “support”.
“Success isn’t about throwing more people or money at a challenge,” Merrill goes on. “We’ve seen small teams at Riot (and elsewhere) build incredible things, while large teams (both at Riot and elsewhere) miss the mark.
“While the League team will ultimately be larger after these changes, what matters more than size is having the right team, right priorities, and a sustainable approach to delivering what players need.”
Previous years have seen similar numbers of staff cut from the same studio, such as in January of 2023 when 46 workers were laid off as “part of our normal course of business”. In the wider games industry, job losses continue to affect many. Here are some of the more recent layoffs, along with the unhelpful euphemisms each company has used to linguistically mask the real human cost of someone losing their job.
Layoffs and job losses are common enough in any business, but they do appear to have been especially frequent in the last few years within the gaming industry. It’s important to remember that behind each number there is a person who has groceries to buy and electricity bills to pay. To say that you cut off their source of income to “evolve”, like some hideous Pokémon, is not comforting or useful, nor an accurate reflection of what has actually happened.